


Because he's gone

by Sleepless_in_Starbucks



Category: Psych
Genre: All Pain, Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Hurt No Comfort, Like really not fun at all, Set in early season 5 but does not follow the canon from there, short but painful
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-18
Updated: 2019-04-18
Packaged: 2020-01-16 01:24:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18511075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sleepless_in_Starbucks/pseuds/Sleepless_in_Starbucks
Summary: It shouldn't have mattered so much, shouldn't have changed so much, shouldn't have hurt so much just because he's gone.





	Because he's gone

**Author's Note:**

> THIS IS SAD AND BASICALLY NO COMFORT  
> YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

Henry left three weeks after the funeral. 

It had been hard enough, before. Shawn didn’t come over as often, and even when he did, Henry could tell he wasn’t nearly as alive as he had once been. Lord, how he wished he could say the news came as a surprise to him. To be shocked and horrified and to wonder how it could have ever happened, because that would have been so much easier.

But things were never easy when Shawn was involved, never. Every message Henry sent out was accompanied by a voice telling him he could have prevented this, every word he wrote for the eulogy reminded him why he was giving it and what a fool he had been for not connecting the dots quicker, every eye watching him an accusation of what he had failed to do. 

He tried to stay, he really did. But after the funeral he felt as though his house had turned against him. Every time he turned a corner there was something waiting to sucker punch him. The “backup pineapple” Shawn had squished into the corner of the fridge, the little green army men Shawn had lost into the couch cushions at some point or another, Shawn’s room itself, all of it reminded him why he couldn’t stay here anymore, because it wasn’t his house anymore. 

It was Shawn’s.

 

Karen quit her job two months after the incident.

What happened to Gus was awful, but she could live with it, she told herself. No one could have known there was another dealer, hiding in the shadows. No one could have gotten Gus away after those twitchy fingers had gotten hold of him. No one could have saved him. 

Was it terrible? Yes. 

Could she deal with it? Yes.

But Karen knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that Shawn’s death was on her, and no one could convince her otherwise.

When Shawn had first come into her office that day, shadows under his eyes, his manner gruff, demanding to be given his job back, she had known straight away only an idiot would reinstate such a broken man. When her sympathies were met with nothing but snorts, that should have settled the matter. 

But the moment his voice cracked, the moment his eyes started to shine, Karen felt her resolve shatter. He needed to work, he explained, he needed to do something. And she fell for it, telling him that as long as he went slow, as long as for the first time in his life he showed some degree of self-restraint, he could go back to working. 

She should have known a week wouldn’t have been enough to quell one’s inner demons.

Of course, the gangster Shawn had made his murderer was going to rot, but it didn’t change anything, really. The effort Karen put into his case was really just a distraction from the body that had been moved into the morgue that she knew deep down she had put there. 

Even once the case was over, Karen had stayed. It was in the nature of her job that she was going to lose employees. It wasn’t anything to quit over. 

After two months of not having a single request for a remeburstment on pineapple smoothies, of not having a single demand for a check that may-or-may-not have actually been earned, of not having a head psychic running about her station and crime scenes, distracting her officers, however, she couldn’t take it anymore.

Without Shawn, the station felt alien in a way it had never felt before, as though he had taken the familiarity Karen had built up after years spent in its halls away with him. So she left, choosing to spend her time with Iris instead of ghosts.

And if some nights it felt like the ghosts had followed her home, well, maybe that was what she deserved.

 

They were still a great team. Despite the losses, despite the people who had left, despite it all, they were still the best cops on the force. 

Even with Lassiter spending every odd night staring at Shawn’s case file, which had taken up permanent residence on his crime wall, trying to decide who was the real killer: the shooter or Shawn, his aim was still the best of all the detectives. 

Even with Juliet constantly finding her thoughts lapsing into the “what ifs” where she had reacted quicker, where she had stopped him, where she had done anything other than watch as the man she had only now realized she loved threw himself in front of that madman pretending to try and talk him down, she was still the first person to find the case-cracking lead time and time again. 

Together, they were unstoppable, taking on the hardest cases without breaking a sweat. In the eyes of the department, they had risen above all that had happened admirably.

But the department didn’t see everything. It didn’t see the deafening silences they fell into on lengthy stakeouts, uninterrupted by the loud and proud psychic. It didn’t see the way their relationship became strictly professional, the easygoing friendship they once maintained overshadowed by Shawn and Gus’s absence. It didn’t see the way they both fought to keep their jobs, not knowing what they’d do with themselves if they quit but also not knowing how they could stay.

Only they saw it, when Lassiter pretended not to notice the photograph Juliet had shoved into one of her drawers, too painful to look at but too important to get rid of. Only they saw it when Juliet ignored every time Lassiter’s head snapped towards the source of any loud noise, expecting it to be someone else.

Only they saw it in the dead of night, at one house or the other, pouring over a casefile that was just a little bit too familiar, unable to sleep because they just had to solve this, both refusing to acknowledge that closing this case, that closing a hundred cases like it would never change the outcome of the only case that really mattered.

And after everything that happened, after what happened to Gus, after what Shawn did, after Henry abandoned the house, after Karen turned in her badge, after they spent so many nights breaking down, Lassiter and Juliet started to wonder why they even stayed.

Without the disturbance of the peace that was the former head psychic, or the more controlled voice that was constantly on his tail; without the older cop constantly in and out of the station because of said psychic; without the bemused voice of the former chief reminding them what they should be doing, the station felt foreign. It was an awful thing to accept, but they didn’t belong there anymore. 

Problem was, they didn’t feel like they belonged anywhere anymore. 

**Author's Note:**

> Okayyyy I hope that was as tragic as I thought it was. It might have been over-preachy or some crap instead, idk. Thanks for reading, either way! If you have any questions, concerns, or would just like to yell at me for what I did, please leave a comment!  
> My tumblr: https://sleepless-in-starbucks.tumblr.com/


End file.
